A Systematic Review of Literature on Offshoring of Value Chain Activities

Locational aspects of a firm's value chain configuration are recently gaining increasing attention by academics, practitioners, and policymakers. In this vein, the international business (IB) literature has produced a substantial body of knowledge on the offshoring phenomenon, offering a sizeable and constantly growing amount of evidence related to the offshoring organization and its organizational and managerial specifics. In this study, I map and assess the existing literature on offshoring of value chain activities. In the course of a systematic literature review, I analyze a total of 63 studies from leading IB research publishing journals and synthesize them into an integrating framework that links offshoring with its antecedents and consequences. In doing so, this systematic literature review offers a two-fold contribution: On the one hand, it helps to identify gaps that IB scholars need to address in order to further develop the existing body of knowledge on offshoring. On the other hand, it provides practitioners with a comprehensive knowledge repertoire that increases the quality of their offshoring-related decision-making.